


Time and distance, time and closeness

by whopooh



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M, MFMM Year of Tropes, Post-Canon, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 12:15:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11532027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whopooh/pseuds/whopooh
Summary: Short snippets of a life together, of distance and closeness.This is to say Happy happy birthday to the lovely Kanste! I know you wanted fluff and shenanigans, but this was the best I could manage!Also, this is my version of the July trope "Through time and space".





	Time and distance, time and closeness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kanste](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanste/gifts).



Jack Robinson stood, both feet firmly planted on the ground and coat billowing slightly in the air, as he intently watched Phryne disappear into the distance. He had a small smile on his lips, his eyes slightly squinting to follow her progression despite the sun. Not until she was out of sight did he return to his car to slowly drive back to City South.

She was gone. 

He already missed her desperately.

Again.

He smiled at himself and at how he – always known among his friends to keep his emotions at bay – simply seemed to have lost that ability when it came to Phryne Fisher. 

The whole thing was reminiscent of the first time she had suddenly left Australia, to fly her father back to England, and the way he had agonised when he hadn’t heard from her in weeks. 

At that time, he had no real claim on her messages and attention, and she hadn’t felt the need to indulge him in every detail of her progression. He had fretted and had repeated nightmares about Phryne plunging into the Indian Ocean and a certain death. The only thing that kept him sane was the fact that Dot came around and shared what she had heard – tales about new cities and an annoying father, relayed in the succinct language of the telegram. 

“Is that all?” he continued to ask her, frustrated to have no communication directed at him at all. “Was there nothing else?”

He would never forget the look in Dot’s eyes. It wasn’t pity exactly, more like curiosity and… concern.

“Nothing else. Should there be?”

 

***

 

The first days after Phryne had left for England this second time, he stayed in his home in Richmond, choosing to go to bed early with a book. He was feeling rather sorry for himself – he never felt as completely alone as when she’d just left. The third morning, as he opened his drawers to take out new socks, he noticed something white among his garments. Curious, he picked up the small correspondence card with her name printed in golden letters at the top. There were two words in her distinct, flamboyant handwriting: “No moping”.

At the end of his shift that day, he telephoned Mac to see if she was free to have a drink. He received a very short answer:

“About time, Inspector.” 

It was several days after their drinks and commiserations about Phryne’s wanderlust that Jack first heard from Phryne. He longed for her with a force that surprised him – that still surprised him. He felt like there was a hole punched out of his life, where she usually resided, and it only closed slightly with time.

He rolled his eyes in response to his own sentimentality. And to how history seemed to repeat itself, even when all the details were different.

That first time she had flown away from him, it had taken almost three weeks before he received a message directed specifically to him. It was a letter, posted in Ceylon, addressed to him at City South. When he saw the envelope and recognised her handwriting, his heart almost dropped out of his chest. He sat in his office chair, weighing the letter in his hand and looking at it for minutes before he managed to open it. 

It was like he was opening the door to his own future. She wrote about missing him and it took his breath away. He hadn’t really understood how much the feeling was mutual until he saw it in writing, in her distinct and slightly messy hand. 

That was the final straw. That letter made him realise he needed to follow her to England. Once he turned up in Southampton she chastised him, of course, for taking so long to understand. Delaying their reunion with three full weeks. The only way he’d managed to silence her was by kissing her.

It didn’t matter that this was now more than five years ago; he could still feel the way she had made him feel that day with her letter, every flutter of hope in his chest.

 

***

 

Once she had made up her mind, Phryne had taken him into her life without any hesitation – into her home, into her confidence, and into her boudoir. He had always known that a Phryne Fisher set on something was magnificent. That proved to be true also in finding a way to be together with a man with a completely different temperament.

What was started in England was surprisingly easy to adjust to Australian soil. 

He stayed true to the sentiment that he would never change her, that he wanted _her_ and not some shrunken down version of her. When she declared, seven months after their return home, that she needed to go to America – to see a friend, to solve a case, and to make some use of her restlessness – he hadn’t stopped her. No matter that he felt devastated and his home empty; he didn’t even try to make her stay. He had promised he wouldn’t. He wanted to see her soar.

He had been alone before; it wasn’t like he couldn’t handle it. But it was a new way of being alone – actually having her in his life, just too far away to talk to, or touch. He felt less alone, but he also missed her and her quirks intensely. Having drinking sprees with Mac, where they competed in joking about how much they missed her, helped some. And, though he was slow to admit it, there was a freedom in being in charge of his own life too. 

When she came home, he told her that. He was sitting on her chaise, with a drink in one hand and his other hand in her lap.

“You really are rather good at this, Inspector,” she said, looking at him curiously. Her voice had an edge, as if she was a tiny bit offended. 

“Would you rather I rotted away here on my own?”

She sized him up for a moment and moved closer to touch his arm.

“Perhaps a tiny bit of decay, just on your outer edges?” she suggested. 

He laughed as he dragged her into his lap.

 

***

 

There came a time when she was determined to travel to China and Nepal. He begged her to let him join her, and it had been a true adventure. One trip he would never forget was the stay in New Zealand – he came over for a week and had to pretend to be a fellow sheep enthusiast. How she managed to become an expert in sheep in a couple of days, he would never know. She joined him when he needed to go to Darwin for a case and the complications made the visit drag on forever; she turned the stay so pleasant he almost forgot he was working. Phryne was always on the move, or at the very least prepared to be; it became part of his life with her.

This time, she was needed in England again, where her family, and at the moment also Jane, resided. He had seen her to the port, of course.

“I’ll only be away for a couple of months,” she admonished him, standing almost flush against him and plucking with his tie as if it needed to be straightened. She touched his face, attempting to physically turn the corners of his mouth upwards, but failing spectacularly. “There’s no need for moping.”

“I know,” he answered, his eyes undecided about whether they should search her eyes or her lips. “But I already miss you.” 

He leaned down to capture her lips with his, and she finally had the success of feeling them turn upwards.

“Just think about how sweet the return will be,” she said with a wink. “And I’ll write.” 

 

***

 

She did write.

She had taken to sending him a large amount of telegrams when she was away. Telegrams were usually used more sparingly, but she was Phryne Fisher, so why would that stop her? After the first days of draught, the telegrams came rather often, first from the ship, later from England.

She also tried out other ways of sending him messages. He could sit in his office, checking a case file, and Hugh would come in with a message for him. Sometimes, they were unintelligible for anyone but Jack, perhaps referencing a line from Shakespeare that he would go and look up. Sometimes, they made him blush. Sometimes she would telephone him, after reading about a Melbourne case in a newspaper. Heedless of the time in Australia she would give him a suggestion that helped him solve the case. 

He had taken to carry her telegrams with him always – they were like charms burning a hole in the pockets of his jacket. That way, he could take them up and thumb them and read them whenever he felt like it. When he missed her particularly much, when he needed the courage, or when he felt unsure of the exact timbre in her voice and needed to amend that. He wondered if he was becoming the police officer with the rustling pockets.

Amelia – Dot and Hugh’s eldest – had figured his secret out and loved to scavenge his pockets when he visited and she demanded to sit on his lap. “Uncl’ Jack, here’s a new message!” she would squee, and demand he read it out aloud for her immediately: “Is it from Phynee?”. Sometimes he read, sometimes he only pretended to read, when they were too complicated for the ears of a three-year-old. He wondered if Amelia might one day learn to read from the telegrams in his pockets, and if she would catch him with not reading correctly. Her eyes glowed when she heard about "Phynees" adventures. He told Phryne as much, in one of their rare telephone exchanges, and after that she sometimes added in a postscript especially for Amelia: “Be good, Ami, but not too good.”

He loved those telegrams – they were a spur of the moment, every one of them, but they spoke of her consideration, about her thoughts of him while exploring the whole of the world out there. He loved plotting his replies. But his favourite thing was her letters. They were long, eloquent, teasing, and they always contained at least one Shakespeare reference just to softly joke with him. There was nothing she couldn’t evoke in him, no matter how far away she was.

 

***

 

“This is a tricky case, Jack,” the Commissioner said. “No chance of running it over with Miss Fisher?”

“She’s not in Melbourne, Sir.”

“Oh. But she is planning to return, isn’t she?” The Commissioner sounded oddly concerned. “You haven’t fallen out?”

Jack’s ears turned red in the tips. How had he come in the position to discuss his private life with his boss? “Not as such, no, Sir.”

The Commissioner looked relieved.

“That’s lucky. For Melbourne, I mean.”

 

***

 

She had settled her business in London and was heading home. She sounded content in her latest letter, but also a bit weary. “Next time Europe needs me, remind me to take you with me,” she wrote, and he felt a mixture of emotions – happy she wanted him there, sad for her feeling lonely enough to write that. “Meet me in Fremantle?”

He surprised her by coming to Colombo, Ceylon, instead. Boarding the ship, he indulged in the way her eyes lit up at the sight of him. It felt like they’d been separated forever, and no time at all.

She came to meet him on the deck, eyes glistening and a smile blooming across her face, although she tried her best to subdue it. She tilted her head and attempted to look nonchalant as her eyes registered every move he made, every slight change to him, noting the few new grey hairs at his temples. Her own hair was still nothing but raven black, and perfectly collected under a red cloche.

“Fancy meeting you here, Inspector,” she said, stepping too close so he would become as breathless as she already was.

“I thought I’d better take the chance,” he answered as he leaned into her. “While you’re properly stuck on a ship and can’t run away from me.”

She smiled all through the kiss, and made sure it was far too scandalously long and sincere to be appropriate for the time and the place.

**Author's Note:**

> I am grateful, as ever, to Fire_Sign for reading and giving suggestions!


End file.
